School of Information Resources and Library Science

This course will cover the principles of identifying, selecting, acquiring, managing, and evaluating information resources for all different types of libraries, information centers, and other information-based settings, including school, public, academic, corporate and special, government, virtual, and traditional libraries of different sizes and scopes. With the increasing presence of electronic resources, the scope of collection development and management has changed and this course will explore those new intersections between library workflow and address information production, different formats, collection assessment and policies, selection and de-selection, intellectual property and legal issues, fiscal and financial planning, readership habits and literacy promotion. A range of assignments will allow students to get first-hand knowledge about the work of a selector or bibliographer in different library settings and to understand the management and administrative functions of information resource development. Students will be encouraged to keep up with a steady and diverse reading list, participate in class discussions and engage in a group project. By the conclusion of the course, students should develop confidence about the role of collection management in library and information center collections.

[detail forthcoming]

"Online instructional course on the Organization of Information." (3 credit hours)

General overview

The SIRLS catalog description is: Introduction to the theories and practices used in the organization of information. Overview of national and international standards and practices for access to information,

This course studies the history, theory and practices of information organization, primarily in traditional and digital libraries. However, other organizations and information evironments such as archives, museums and management information systems are also included. This is an introductory course that surveys the information and knowledge organization techniques that exist or are emerging, and focuses on standards and tools that are used in large text-based information environments

It is recommended that you complete your evaluation and information technology electives before enrolling in IRLS 515.

Read Coleman, A. 2002. Interdisciplinarity : The Road Ahead for Education in Digital Libraries. D-Lib Magazine , 8 (7/8), July/August. This article will help you understand the sequence of courses that you can take in the area of Knowledge Organization (= Information Organization).

How this course will be taught

This is an online course taught virtually at a distance using the Web. The course is conceived of as discussions on 15 (or so) topics. A lecture course in the University of Arizona amounts to 37 1/2 hours of instruction spread through a semester. Our 'discussions' will be the virtual counterpart of 15 (or so) two and a half hour lectures, delivered at a rate of two a week. There will be notes, readings, discussion groups, chat, and (of course) assignments.

The course has a start date and an end date, and the class as a whole will move through the course together The primary means of introducing the scholarly material will be Notes. These are going to be posted one at a time steadily through the session, keeping the whole class moving forward through the material. There are 15 plus sets of Notes, and these normally will be delivered at a rate of 2 a week (usually put up on a Tuesday and a Friday). There will be assignments, with due dates, and formal discussions, and these will serve to check progress. There also will be readings or references to be followed up on the Web.

Almost all interactions will be asynchronous. That is, students can log on whenever they wish, and read material and post replies on timetables that suits their individual needs. A student will typically need to log on about 5 times a week. (An analog here is email-- most folk check their email at least five times a week.)

d2l (desire to learn) is used as the instructional and course management environment. Students who enrol in the course will be given an account. They will be able to log in to their account via the Learning Technologies Center E-Learning Portal. d2l has facilities for internal email, and this will be one way to contact the Instructor or the Graduate Assistant Teacher (GAT).

Students are expected to log on reasonably regularly, to read and study the Notes and references, to participate in the online discussions, to interact by email (and other means) with their fellow students, to write (or otherwise answer) the assignments, to download and upload files (this will be taught), and to carry out various other activities. It is hard to anticipate accurately how much time all these course related activities will take in total (and such a figure would vary from student to student and from week to week), but, for a summer course, ten hours a week is a rough order of magnitude estimate.

The course will start in earnest a few days after the start of the semester. The d2l software can detect when students log on, and when most of the students have shown that the are present by logging on, the Instructor will get the course underway.

"This course is designed to introduce concepts relating to providing consumer health information with particular attention to Native American and Hispanic communities. 3 credit hours."

What will we be covering in this course?

The topics in this course include National Library of Medicine online resources; locating age specific health resources, particularly for teens; evaluating health web sites; conducting the health reference interview; and examining different models for libraries and roles for librarians in providing consumer health information to diverse communities. Native American and Hispanic resources will be highlighted.

So how are we going to do this?

Health disparities are a significant problem with various population groups including Native Americans and Hispanic Americans. The literature indicates that health information needs to address cultural issues as well as health needs of special population groups.

Providing consumer health information to individuals is a growing trend. Librarians are competing with search engines like Google, for-profit websites such as WebMD and commercial sites selling products. Librarians can provide access to good quality health information in a number of ways. In order to provide this kind of service, librarians need to know and understand the tools available.

This course is a blend of in-person and online instruction. The classes will be taught with demonstrations and discussions of various resources, in-class assignments and exercises, and guest lecturers who specialize in aspects of our subject. Because the course is taught over a short period of time, it will be quite intensive in order to cover all the material and concepts. The online component will include webcasts, web-based tutorials, podcasts, exercises and D2L discussions.

Students can bring life experiences into the discussions. Students will be able to choose the topic of many projects in light of their own culture/community. Students are expected to be present at every class and participate in discussions virtually and in person. There will be individual as well as group assignments.

This course will prepare students to meet the consumer health information needs of diverse populations through knowledge of Native American and Hispanic databases, websites and other resources.

"Study of the basics of ethical theory and its application to problems in information management. Application and development of ethical codes in case studies."

Content of the Course

Information professionals play an extremely important role in society. And it is critical that they carry out their mission in an ethical manner. Toward this end, many organizations of information professionals have adopted codes of professional ethics. See, for example, ALA’s Code of Ethics and ASIST’s Professional Guidelines.

Such codes of professional ethics provide information professionals with guiding principles. However, there are a number of reasons why information professionals need to understand the ethical reasoning that justifies acting in accordance with these principles. First, it is no simple matter to apply these principles to particular concrete situations. An understanding of the underlying ethical reasoning can help us to apply these principles to such situations. Second, these principles often come into conflict with other obligations that we have. (They can even come into conflict with each other.) An understanding of the underlying ethical reasoning can help us to resolve such conflicts. Third, our ethical duties can be supported by or come into conflict with various organizational rules, public policy, and laws. An understanding of the relationship between law and ethics and the basic principles of public policy and legal theory will help us act within the law and advocate for change when that is appropriate.

In this course, we will study the various ethical theories that have been proposed by philosophers. We will then apply these theories to the ethical dilemmas that most commonly confront information professionals. We will also look more in depth at public policy, economic, and legal issues surrounding the provision of information and library services. In particular, we will focus on issues such as intellectual freedom, equitable access to information, privacy, and intellectual property. In addition, we will look at how advances in information technology have created new ethical dilemmas.

Students will be encouraged to develop their own views on the issues. These views will be developed and defended, however, in relation to understanding of ethical theory and key aspects of information policy and law.

Teaching/Learning Methods

This course will be delivered virtually through d2l. The course will include such assignments and activities as reading or listening to on-line lectures, engaging in on-line discussions, journaling, writing short summary pieces and longer papers, and presenting research via virtual presentations.

"Online instructional course on User Interface in Information Systems, Human Computer Interaction, and Web Site Design and Evaluation." (3 credit hours)

General overview

To adapt Ranganathan: information is for use. Nowadays, much of stored or recorded information is available electronically, and typically it is accessed through computers and networks, for example, by means of web sites. So the User often meets the information at the interface between humans and computers. The academic discipline of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) studies exactly this interface.

This course offers instruction in a) the User Interface in Information Systems, b) Human Computer Interaction, and c) the design and evaluation of 'information' web sites. (Not all web sites aim primarily at presenting information-- some are for entertainment, many are for commerce. These types of sites are not considered in this course.)

HCI itself addresses the problem of designing composite systems, of humans and computers, which are both safe and efficient. This is an extremely important problem these days because everybody is a User. [30 years ago, computers could have all sorts of interface shortcomings because only experts used them and the experts could use their skills to overcome the difficulties. But now we are all Users, and we don't want difficulties!]

When looking at HCI, four considerations, and their interactions, are prominent

• human capabilities. These include physical and cognitive issues: what folk can do with their hands, eyes, and brains. Humans are highly variable, and have cognitive strengths and weaknesses (for example, humans have poor memories yet good abilities to recognize patterns in a visual scene).
• the technical features of the computing machines. Principally what the computer presents, and receives by way of input and output; and the style of the interaction between the User and the computer. For example, an older computer might be able to take input only from a keyboard, and give output only to a printer-- in which case, human-computer interaction would be similar to a dialog or conversation (these days the possibilities are far richer with, for example, mice for input and sophisticated visual displays for output).
• the tasks being undertaken. For example, there is a world of difference between typing in a document for word processing, and producing some architectural drawings using a CAD/CAM package. Additionally, a modern trend is that of moving from the single user-- single interface to group working and multitasking (for example, computers are used extensively now in the cockpits of commercial aircraft and in that setting there is a team of humans interacting with several computers).
• the environment. What is the work, or task, setting? What are its physical and socio-cultural characteristics? (For example, it is unwise to use sound input or output in a noisy setting; another example, it is unwise to expect children to spell keywords perfectly for a Search in an Online Public Access Catalog in a library.)

The academic backdrop to HCI

Many academic disciplines have a role to play in the theories behind HCI and Web Site design, including:

Cognitive psychology

• to provide knowledge of what users can and cannot be expected to do
• to identify and explain the nature and causes of some of the problems that Users encounter
• to supply modelling tools and methods to help build interfaces that are easy to use

Social psychology (social knowledge)

• to offer knowledge of context of use
• to identify and explain how people work together and to suggest which computer systems are needed to support collaborative working
• to provide frameworks for social interaction and conversation (which, in turn, can form the basis of someHCI frameworks)

Organizational psychology (organizational knowledge)

• to provide models of processes and structures in organizations
• to identify 'trouble spots' in organizations which stop computers being used optimally
• to supply methods for design and evaluation of new technologies that are being introduced into the work settings

Computer Science, to offer the theories and practices (and software and hardware)

• to transform the information from the input devices into input that the computer can make use of
• to tranform the output from the computer into a form suitable for the output devices
• to produce the computing environments to host the favoured interaction style

Ergonomics

• to match the physical characteristics of the devices with the physiological characteristics of the User
• to consider special considerations for Users with disabilities (eg. what kind of mouse is suitable for a User with arthritis)
• to consider safety issues connected with the Users being injured (RSI etc.)

Linguistics

• to understand language issues
• to design syntactically simple, yet semantically powerful and unambiguous, language fragments
• tohelp with iconic or diagrammatic languages

Artificial intelligence

• to leverage the abilities of both the User and the computer
• to suggest agents, knowbots, wizards, intelligent help systems, and intelligent interfaces

Philosophy

• to help using its dispassionate, deep, and clear analysis of problems

Sociology, and Anthropology

• to identify how different people, of different cultures, behave, individually and in groups, when carrying out tasks using computers

HCI, in sum

HCI is a multi-disciplinary field encompassing cognitive psychology, social and organizational psychology, computer science, ergonomics, linguistics, artificial intelligence, philosophy, sociology and anthropology.

HCI is concerned with the design, evaluation, and implementation of interactive computer systems and study of major phenomena surrounding their use.

Web Site design

Web site design augments HCI-- it applies and extends the principles of HCI in a special case. To make a rough and ready distinction. Plain stand alone computers tend to calculate what they offer, whereas web sites are part of a network or networks and tend to retrieve information they, or others, already have and offer that. So the design of web sites can put an emphasis on the organization of information, on information architecture (IA), and the management of information. The design of web sites brings into play traditional library science skills.

How this course will be taught

This is an online course taught virtually at a distance using the Web. The course is conceived of as discussions on 15 (or so) topics. A lecture course in the University of Arizona amounts to 37 1/2 hours of instruction spread through a semester. Our 'discussions' will be the virtual counterpart of 30 (or so) one and a quarter hour lectures, delivered at a rate of three a week. There will be notes, readings, discussion groups, chat, and (of course) assignments.

The course has a start date and an end date, and the class as a whole will move through the course together The primary means of introducing the scholarly material will be Notes. These are going to be posted one at a time steadily through the session, keeping the whole class moving forward through the material. There are 20 plus sets of Notes, and these normally will be delivered at a rate of 3 a week (usually put up on a Monday, Wednesday and a Friday). There will be assignments, with due dates, and formal discussions, and these will serve to check progress. There also will be readings or references to be followed up on the Web.

Almost all interactions will be asynchronous. That is, students can log on whenever they wish, and read material and post replies on timetables that suits their individual needs. A student will typically need to log on about 5 times a week. (An analog here is email-- most folk check their email at least five times a week.)

The students will also be placed in groups of about 4 students and there will be some groupwork. (There are two main reasons here. One central problem for distance education is the 'sense of isolation' that students can feel-- being a member of a small group is one counter to this. Second, the course itself in part studies groups using computer technologies to achieve group goals-- course groupwork gives a student direct experience of this task.)

d2l (desire to learn) is used as the instructional and course management environment. Students who enrol in the course will be given an account. They will be able to log in to their account via the Learning Technologies Center E-Learning Portal. d2l has facilities for internal email, and this will be one way to contact the Instructor or the Graduate Assistant Teacher (GAT).

Students are expected to log on reasonably regularly, to read and study the Notes and references, to participate in the online discussions, to interact by email (and other means) with their fellow students, to write (or otherwise answer) the assignments, to download and upload files (this will be taught), and to carry out various other activities. It is hard to anticipate accurately how much time all these course related activities will take in total (and such a figure would vary from student to student and from week to week), but seven hours a week is a rough order of magnitude estimate.

The course will start in earnest a few days after the start of the semester. The d2l software can detect when students log on, and when most of the students have shown that the are present by logging on, the Instructor will get the course underway.

"This course is designed to introduce the basic concepts and applications of Internet-related information technology and its impacts on individual users, groups, organizations, and society. The topics in this survey course include computing basics, network applications, human computer interactions, computer-support cooperative work, social aspects of information systems, and some economic and legal issues related to digital services and products." (3 credit hours)

"If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside." -- Robert X. Cringely.

Introduction to Information Technology is a course about computers, but it is not just about computers. More than any other recent development, the computer, and specifically Internet-related technology, has changed the way humans interact with the world, information, and each other. To understand social change in the digital age and the implications for information professionals, it is necessary to have a broad understanding of technology. This course will cover the history and development of computers and networking, survey Internet technologies, and describe some of the electronic tools that are found in modern libraries. Students will be assigned hands-on projects that reinforce important concepts. We will also look at the implications and consequences of information technology such as collaboration, hacking, access/ownership, free-inquiry, and information economics.

The purpose of this course is not to teach you how to be an engineer, administrator, web mistress, or even a systems librarian. Rather, upon completion of IRLS 471/571, you should be able to intelligently discuss library and Internet technology with IT professionals, make reasoned purchase recommendations, constructively critique web sites, and present information online in an effective and appealing manner. You should also understand enough about inevitable technological change to help your institution plan for success.

General familiarity with computers will help on some assignments, but as the semester progresses, we'll find that we all have strengths and weaknesses when it comes to the course material. "1337 haxors" may find some of the early tech-oriented assignments relatively easy, but they won't necessarily have any advantage when it comes to the contextual issues surrounding technology.

Course Contents

The summer course is composed of 5 interdependent units. We will spend one or two weeks on each topic. In order, the units are as follows:

Unit 1: Introduction and History of Computing
Unit 2: Operating Systems, Networking,Programming Languages and Formal Troubleshooting
Unit 3: Internet Technologies
Unit 4: User Interface Design, Information Seeking Behavior and Website Evaluation
Unit 5: Library Technology and Social Issues

Course Delivery

This is a virtual course with the majority of interaction taking place in the UofA's course management system, Desire2Learn (D2L). In D2L we have access to email, announcements, discussion boards, an assignment drop-box, a resource repository, a chat room, and a secure grade book. We will use all of these features this semester. Many of the online lectures include both video and sound. No on-campus attendance is required.

A normal week will start on Tuesday when the Unit assignment (if any) from the previous week will be due by 8:00pm. New lectures will be posted on Wednesday. Announcements and discussion postings may be added at any time. Every attempt will be made to release the grades for Tuesday's assignment by midnight on Friday.

Small groups will be assigned about three weeks in to the class when the roster has stabilized. This is also when we will discuss the details of the group project.

The final exam will be distributed the last week of the course. It will be essay format, select several questions from a list, and will require synthesis of the knowledge you have been acquiring during the semester. The final is optional for student registered in IRLS 471.

What to Expect

There are two areas to consider when planning your time commitment during the semester. We will share about 40 hours of "mediated instruction" (it would be "classroom time" if we were in a face-to-face course), or about 2.5 hours per week. This will consist of everything from text-based lectures and interactive tutorials to multi-media Flash presentations with music, dancing, and explosions (okay, I'm exaggerating a bit here). Homework will include required reading, finding and using optional resources, and assignments--a target of 10 hours per week, with some weeks much less, other weeks slightly more. Plan on a combined total of 12-13 hours per week for an average student to keep up with the class.

The good news is that the course is entirely asynchronous, you can log in to D2L any time you wish. Having said that, to keep up with the discussion boards and your group members, you should expect to check in about 5 times a week; once a day Monday-Friday is perfect. Keep in mind that most of the important information will be distributed on Wednesday. If you are going to be unable to access the class for more than three or four days in a row, please let me know so we can make some special arrangements.

I have a love-hate relationship with group projects. It is very difficult to make sure every participant does his/her fair share and receives an appropriate grade. However, there are three aspects of groupwork that redeem it as a learning tool for this particular course. First, it tends to break down the sense of isolation, a chronic problem of distance education. Second, virtually all technology development is done in groups, teams, and committees--to really understand technology development you have to understand small-group dynamics. Third, an important aspect of this class is understanding collaborative technologies; how better to learn than by using technology to collaborate? A couple of components of the group project will be assigned as individual work to make the experience less stressful.

The final exam will be written toward a three-hour time block, that is to say, spending much more time on it than three hours will result in diminishing returns.

"Online instructional course on Research Methods." (3 credit hours)

General overview

"Research is fundamentally a state of mind involving continual re-examination of the doctrines and axioms upon which current thought and action are based. It is, therefore, critical of existing practices." Theobald Smith, 1929

"The maddening thing about research was that most answers just meant more questions.... " Corian Trevanni, Wintermind, Marvin Kaye and Parke Godwin, 1982

Research is the process of offering conjectures to solve problems, and of the testing, and sometimes refuting, of those conjectures. It is a process of theory building and hypothesis testing-- the sifting and winnowing of ideas that leads to new knowledge, and new interpretations of old knowledge. It is a search for truth. And what it achieves are views that might reasonably be believed to be the truth, in the light of the evidence and the critical dialog.

Research is a term that is used casually to cover everything from poking around in an encyclopaedia to rigorous experiments using control groups and sophisticated statistical techniques. There is, in fact, a continuum that encompasses both these examples. For this class, however, we are going to settle somewhere at the middle of the continuum. Research is not just looking in an encyclopedia or in a library. This course aims at what might be described as mainstream social science research as practiced in universities.

No one can be taught to be a researcher in a single three hour course. However, you can be taught to be a better consumer of research in a three hour course. There is good research, and bad research. The aim is to get you to be able to tell the difference, and understand and articulate what the differences amount to.

The course opens with a historical and intellectual background to research. It moves through experimental and quasi-experimental design, explaining the notions of evidence, validity, and reliability. Different styles of research are described including: quantitative research, qualitative research, field research, archival research, and laboratory experiments. There are discussions of sampling and elementary descriptive and inferential statistics. (Doing extensive mathematical calculations is not part of the course. We do, though, try to develop an educated and critical eye for looking at other people's choice of tests and calculations.) Research proposals and research reports are discussed. The course closes with an account of the types of research commonly found in Library and Information Science (such as evaluation research, qualitative research, surveys and questionnaires, and bibliometrics).

How this course will be taught

This is an online course taught virtually at a distance using the Web. The course is conceived of as discussions on 20 (or so) topics. A lecture course in the University of Arizona amounts to 37 1/2 hours of instruction spread through a semester. Our 'discussions' will be the virtual counterpart of 30 (or so) one and a quarter hour lectures, delivered at a rate of two a week. There will be notes, readings, discussion groups, chat, and (of course) assignments.

The course has a start date and an end date, and the class as a whole will move through the course together The primary means of introducing the scholarly material will be Notes. These are going to be posted one at a time steadily through the session, keeping the whole class moving forward through the material. There are 20 plus sets of Notes, and these normally will be delivered at a rate of 2 a week (usually put up on a Tuesday and a Friday). There will be assignments, with due dates, and formal discussions, and these will serve to check progress. There also will be readings or references to be followed up on the Web.

Almost all interactions will be asynchronous. That is, students can log on whenever they wish, and read material and post replies on timetables that suits their individual needs. A student will typically need to log on about 5 times a week. (An analog here is email-- most folk check their email at least five times a week.)

The students will also be placed in groups of about 4 students and there will be some groupwork.

d2l (desire to learn) is used as the instructional and course management environment. Students who enrol in the course will be given an account. They will be able to log in to their account via the Learning Technologies Center E-Learning Portal. d2l has facilities for internal email, and this will be one way to contact the Instructor or the Graduate Assistant Teacher (GAT).

Students are expected to log on reasonably regularly, to read and study the Notes and references, to participate in the online discussions, to interact by email (and other means) with their fellow students, to write (or otherwise answer) the assignments, to download and upload files (this will be taught), and to carry out various other activities. It is hard to anticipate accurately how much time all these course related activities will take in total (and such a figure would vary from student to student and from week to week), but seven hours a week is a rough order of magnitude estimate.

The course will start in earnest a few days after the start of the semester. The d2l software can detect when students log on, and when most of the students have shown that the are present by logging on, the Instructor will get the course underway.